Last week it was little kids and a red rubber ball that got me thinking about childhood, and this week it was highwaters. Yes, highwaters.
Don’t know what highwaters are? That’s when your pants are a bit too short, rising up on your ankles so a couple inches of sock peek out to the daylight, wave at the world and cause you no end of embarrassment. If you wear highwaters, you can’t walk three inches without someone remarking, “What time you expecting the flood, dorkasaur?”
I thought of this one day while wearing an older pair of pants that looked a millimeter too short for my taste. Fine by fashion standards, but you can’t help but be insecure as the memories of schoolyard razzing comes rushing back. “Mom, why’d you hem ‘em so short!”
I nearly changed as I’ve worked too hard in this life for one single reason: to never be caught in highwaters again.
These are the things little boys pledge to themselves when they are young, especially if they went to private schools and had to wear uniforms. I went to grade school at Tampa’s Academy of the Holy Names, an all boys Catholic school on the bayshore that still had nuns in habits. Actually, it wasn’t all boys.
Across the street, in a hardened bunker, behind a chain link fence with barbed wire on top and Doberman pinchers with assault rifles, was the girl’s school. But we didn’t get near them much.
All the better. When you’re a growing boy with a limited number of uniforms and a propensity to ruin them on the playground to the point that you look like one of those orphan refugee children from third world countries you see on TV, you ain’t gonna’ attract the ladies.
It wasn’t just highwaters, but also patches on your knees and mustard stains on your bright white polo with the Academy insignia on the breast.
Kids who went to public school could wear anything, including tarps they found out in the garage, and that gave them plenty of options. At the beginning of the school year, us uniform-wearing kids got a couple pairs of khaki trousers, a stack of white polos and a pair of black lace-ups that had the style equivalent of pocket protectors and a beanie, and that was it. You start out looking sharp when school starts, but by the end of the year, you’re a cross between a hobo and a giant walking grass stain.
I remember grass stains that looked like tire skid marks, as if a semi truck with green tires had screeched to a halt on my pants.
Parents, of course, don’t believe in buying new uniforms midway through the school year just because you’re growing, have a hole in the knee or the sole fell off one of your shoes.
Besides, all those dives for footballs and commando assault jumps off the top of bleachers were technically our fault. And growing? Yeah, I guess that was our fault. “What is the matter with you two boys?” my mother used to demand of my brother and me as she survey zippers that we couldn’t zip no matter how hard we sucked in our stomachs. She considered herbs to stunt our growth.
By the end of the year, when our class would line up in the quad for the morning prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance and some kind of announcement about how we were permanently assigned to detention, the whole class looked like prisoners of war — frayed shoe laces, rips down the sides of pants, shirt collars torn off, shoes that looked like they had been in dog fights and lost.
And highwaters. A class full of rag-tag kids with their socks peaking out. There were only a few things worse at that age, and to this day, only a few things I will never let happen again. So goodbye old pants. You bring back too many awful memories.